Data sources for customer analysis and targeting

How well do businesses really know their customers?

As consumer expectations for relevant content and offers grow as they experience top retailers such as Amazon, companies need to focus even more on customer experience through relevant communications.

When completing our Managing Digital Marketing in 2015 research we were interested to see how well companies do understand their customers since many respondents said that improving use of CRM and applying Big Data concepts was a priority for this year.

We asked businesses which of the classic segmentation and targeting techniques they used to target their customers using online marketing, for example targeted emails or web-based personalisation.

The results show that, overall businesses are long way from the 360 degree customer view and personalised customer lifecycle marketing that many have discussed for a long time.

As marketers we see a lot of examples about how we should improve creative and copy, but it's targeting to increase relevance that will give the best improvements.

How many data sources are used to assess customer experience?

As we were were preparing our research report we also saw this related report from Ventana Research showing that companies are limiting the data sources to measure effectiveness. What about social media influencer score, Customer LTV and NPS?

Read more in the Slideshare summarising their research on the '3 Waves of the Customer Experience'.